Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe Volume 37 Issue 4 Special Issue on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of the Autocephaly of the Article 6 Macedonian Orthodox Church 7-2017 Ohrid Literary School in the Period of Tzar Samoil and the Beginnings of the Russian Church Literature Gjorgi Pop-Atanasov Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/ree Part of the Christianity Commons, Eastern European Studies Commons, and the Slavic Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Pop-Atanasov, Gjorgi (2017) "Ohrid Literary School in the Period of Tzar Samoil and the Beginnings of the Russian Church Literature," Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe: Vol. 37 : Iss. 4 , Article 6. Available at: https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/ree/vol37/iss4/6 This Article, Exploration, or Report is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ George Fox University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ George Fox University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. OHRID LITERARY SCHOOL IN THE PERIOD OF TSAR SAMOIL AND THE BEGINNINGS OF THE RUSSIAN CHURCH LITERATURE By Gjorgi Pop-Atanasov Gjorgi Pop-Atanasov was born on November 8, 1940, in the village of Eleshnitsa in the Pirin part of Macedonia. He completed his higher education at the Faculty of Theology in Sofia where he graduated in 1967. He earned his master’s and doctorate degrees at the Faculty of Philology at the University “Ss. Cyril and Methodius” in Skopje. He works in the field of medieval Macedonian literature. Since 2012, he is a full member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Abstract The article is concerned with the role of St. Clement’s Church in the preservation and the spread of Cyril and Methodius’s literary tradition and Slavic church services. Special emphasis is placed on the work of the Ohrid Literary School in the time of Tsar Samoil and the spread of Slavic literacy from its centers toward Macedonia’s neighboring countries and the Kievan Rus.’ It is known that after the death of St. Methodius (April 6, 885) and the failure of the Moravian mission (863-885), the students of the holy brothers, Cyril and Methodius, were expelled from Great Moravia. Some of them, by different roads, came to the South Slavic territory which at the time was part of the medieval Bulgarian state. Among these students of Cyril and Methodius were Sts. Clement, Naum, and Angelarius, who came to the Bulgarian capital, Pliska, toward the end of 885, at a time when medieval Bulgaria was governed by Prince Boris I. When Cyril and Methodius’s students arrived in the Bulgarian capital, after they had been forced to leave Great Moravia due to the fierce persecution by the Latin rite clergy, they found themselves once again in a hostile environment. Taking into account the fact that the Bulgarian OCCASIONAL PAPERS ON RELIGION IN EASTERN EUROPE (JULY 2017) XXXVII, 4 74 church, which had been founded in 870 AD, was run by a Byzantine church hierarchy led by an archbishop who was a Byzantine by birth, and the services and sermons were performed in the Byzantine Greek language, these newcomers to the Bulgarian capital, that is, Cyril and Methodius’s students, were not allowed to worship nor preach in the church sanctuaries in a Slavic language.1 For this reason and in order to avoid a more serious clash between Cyril and Methodius’s students and the Byzantine-Greek hierarchy which governed the Bulgarian church, Prince Boris sent the holy Clement and Naum to a newly conquered territory2—the Kutmichevica area, in the western part of Macedonia, where the church still had neutral status.3 The conditions there were favorable to St. Clement and he, with the support of his companion from the Moravian mission, St. Naum, created an independent church organization which was not dependent either on Rome, or on Constantinople, and even less on the Byzantine Greek hierarchy of the Pliska-Preslav church organization. Unlike Pliska and Preslav, where the official alphabet was the Byzantine Greek and where the services and sermons were performed in the Byzantine Greek language, Cyril's Glagolitic alphabet was the official script in St. Clement's church and the Slavic language was used for services and worship. This written and liturgical tradition continued even after the death of St. Clement, in St. Clement's Church and St. Clement's Ohrid Literary School, which functioned within the church organization founded by St. Clement. That church organization, whose spiritual and canonical heir is today's Macedonian Orthodox Church-Ohrid Archbishopric, will play the role of savior of Cyril and Methodius’s work, of Slavic literacy, and the Slavic liturgical tradition. This is especially true of the time when Macedonia was ruled by the Cometopuli dynasty and its most important representative, Tsar 1 П. Георгиев, Плиска. – Кирило-Методиевска енциклопедия, том 3, София :2003, 154. 2 Е. Георгиев, Люлка на старата и новата българска писменост, София 1980, 60. 3 И. Добрев, Кирило-Методиевите ученици през първите години след пристигането им в България (886– 893). (София: Изследвания по Кирило-Методиевистика, 1985), 145. OCCASIONAL PAPERS ON RELIGION IN EASTERN EUROPE (JULY 2017) XXXVII, 4 75 Samoil, when Slavic literacy and Slavic services had spread from Macedonia to several of its neighboring countries and in Kievan Rus.’ During the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh centuries, many literary scholars worked at the literary centers of the Ohrid Literary School. They were direct students of Clement and Naum, or students of their students. That period of about 100 years (916-1018) saw the creation of numerous literary works, which at the beginning were written mostly in the Glagolitic script, but later, concurrently to the Glagolitic ones, Cyrillic script church books were also written. These considerations are supported by the fact that out of the ten oldest Cyrillic manuscripts created during the tenth century, eight are linked to the literary activity within the Ohrid St.Clement’s School. The predating of these oldest Cyrillic manuscripts and their localization was made, near the end of his life, by the prominent paleoslavist, Prof. Vladimir Moshin,4 who, besides the Macedonian Cyrillic fragments (Novgorod Fragments, Hilandar Folios, Undol’skij’s Fragments, Resen Fragment of Triodion, Macedonian Cyrillic Folio, and Zographos Fragments) also added to the manuscripts created by the circle of the Ohrid School the Codex Suprasliensis and Sava’s book, which in Slavic scholarship were traditionally linked with the Preslav Literary Centre. According to Moshin, only two of the oldest Cyrillic manuscripts (created during the tenth century) have a non-Macedonian provenience—the Bulgarian Enina Apostle and the Russian Sluck Psalter—which was copied from a South Slavic antigraph, most likely, connected to the Ohrid Literary School. The issue related to the predating of the Codex Suprasliensis from the eleventh to the tenth centuries was proposed by the German paleoslavist Alfons Margulies back in 1927. On the basis of Margulies’ precise argumentation grounded on a detailed paleographic and orthographic 4 See: Вл. Мошин, “Древнейшие кирилловские рукописи” In Избрани дела, книга деветта, (Скопје: Менора, 2011), 7-88. OCCASIONAL PAPERS ON RELIGION IN EASTERN EUROPE (JULY 2017) XXXVII, 4 76 linguistic analysis of the manuscript, as well as on his own knowledge during the study of this ancient Slavic manuscript, Moshin dated the Codex Suprasliensis more accurately, placing its creation in the period of Tsar Samoil, toward the end of the tenth or in the beginning of the eleventh centuries.5 According to Moshin, the Codex Suprasliensis was written in Macedonia based on a Preslav protograph which is indicated by some linguistic peculiarities of the manuscript—mix of and , replacement of the yers semivowels with and and etc.6 In that sense, the parallelism during the use of certain diacritics is especially indicative, for example, dots and arcs (apostrophes) for designation of iotation which is explained by the fact that a mix of the Ohrid and Preslav prosodic system occurred in this Macedonian transcription of the redacted Preslav Menologion.7 This thesis of Moshin is also supported by the various layers in the language of the manuscript,8 as well as the opinion of other authors that the composition of the Codex Suprasliensis reflects several phases of the development of the Slavic codices from the Morava mission of the holy Cyril and Methodius until the end of the tenth century.9 As it is already known, the Suprasl Ortodox Monastery where this Old Slavonic manuscript was found was established in 1498 by Aleksander Chodkiewicz, and most of the monks living there had come from the Kievan monasteries.10 On the other hand, there are findings that the manuscript was already in Russia in the thirteenth century and that it was kept in the library of 5 Вл. Мошин, Палеографски албум на јужнословенското кирилско писмо, (Скопје: 1966), 8. 6 Вл. Мошин, “Македонско јеванђеље X века и проблем ревизије правописног и палеографског критерија најстаријих старословенских рукописа.” In: Избрани дела, книга втора, (Скопје: Менора, 2003), 40. 7 Вл. Мошин, “Древнейшие кирилловские рукописи,” 40. 8 Елка Мирчева, “Codex suprasliensis и bibliotheca hagiographica balcano-slavica (некоторые размышления относотельно состава одной